Summary
Four tools that are really one endpoint at four speeds — and picking the wrong one is the usual mistake.
An agent handed all four will reach for research when ask would have done, because the name sounds more thorough. It costs minutes. The useful habit is to treat ask as the default and reserve research for questions where you would genuinely have opened ten tabs. Perplexity being the vendor also means the search index behind it is the one their product is built on, not a resold API.
What it is
Perplexity's own endpoint, exposing their Agent API through four tools that differ mainly in how long they think.
What you get
- perplexity_search — ranked web search
- perplexity_ask — quick question and answer
- perplexity_research — deep research
- perplexity_reason — complex reasoning
- The four correspond to the fast, high and medium presets of the Agent API
Requirements
An API key from the console, sent as a bearer token. Claude Code, Cursor and VS Code have one-click installs; clients without remote support can run the published package locally instead.
Setup effort
Paste a URL with a key — add the endpoint to your client